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1 Health Insurance and the Demand for Medical Care: Instrumental Variable Estimates Using Health Insurer Claims Data Abe Dunn y January 28, 2015 Abstract This paper takes a di erent approach to estimating demand for medical care that uses the negotiated prices between insurers and providers as an instrument. The instrument is viewed as a textbook cost shifting instrument that impacts plan o erings, but is unobserved by consumers. The paper nds a price elasticity of demand of around -0.20, matching the elasticity found in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. The paper also studies within-market variation in demand for prescription drugs and other medical care services and obtains comparable price elasticity estimates. 1 Introduction U.S. medical care expenditures account for a large and growing share of GDP and policy-makers continue to search for mechanisms to rein in expenditure growth. In this environment, understanding the demand for medical care is critical. Estimates of the price elasticity of demand may improve our understanding of patient incentives and lead to policies to help slow the growth of the health care sector. Unfortunately, estimating medical care demand is particularly challenging. One of the central problems is that the marginal price of medical care faced by consumers is often determined by consumers through their selection of a health insurance plan. For instance, the least healthy individuals may be more likely to choose a plan with the most generous insurance coverage, leading to an overestimate of the e ect on medical care demand when looking at correlations between the out-of-pocket price and the utilization of medical care. Both the economic importance of measuring the elasticity of demand as well as the substantial empirical challenge caused by selection were key motivations for conducting the RAND health insurance experiment in the 1970s. The RAND experiment was speci cally designed to address the selection problem. The key to its success was the randomization of health insurance coverage across the sample population that allowed researchers to side-step the selection issue and isolate the e ect of cost sharing on demand. Although it has been more than 30 years since the RAND experiment was conducted, it remains the gold standard for The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily re ect the views of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. the American Society of Health Economists. I would like to thank seminar participants at the International Health Economics Conference and Shapiro, Jonathan Skinner and Brett Wendling for comments. y Bureau of Economic Analysis; I would also like to thank Ana Aizcorbe, Eli Liebman, Rashmita Basu, Adam 1

2 understanding consumer responsiveness to out-of-pocket price. However, the study has several limitations. Most importantly, since the study was conducted, the share of GDP devoted to medical care has doubled and medical technologies have changed substantially. These dramatic changes suggest that the evidence from the RAND experiment may be relatively dated and there are also questions regarding medical care demand that remain unanswered in today s environment. 1 search for alternative approaches to estimating the demand for medical care. Consequently, researchers have continued to This paper takes a di erent approach to estimating demand, which relies on an often noted industry feature: the out-of-pocket price paid by the consumer is typically not the same as the full price paid to the medical care provider (i.e., the allowed amount). With this in mind, this paper argues that the negotiated price between insurers and medical providers in an MSA may be thought of as a textbook cost shifter instrument. The theoretical justi cation is clear: the package of bene ts o ered to enrollees will be a ected by pro t maximizing insurers responding to the negotiated price for medical services in an area. At the same time, the negotiated price should be uncorrelated with the selection of an insurance plan, since consumers are typically unaware of the negotiated prices with providers. 2 Moreover, medical provider contracts are negotiated prior to setting insurance plan o erings and the negotiated price is typically the same for both the least generous plans and the most generous plans, greatly reducing the possibility that the instrument would be related to plan selection. Finally, the instrument is likely to be strong, since the negotiated price di ers substantially across MSAs. This empirical fact is documented in detail by Dunn, Shapiro, and Liebman (2013). This can also be seen by looking at examples of speci c price di erences. For instance, the average negotiated price for a 15-minute o ce visit with a general MD in Minneapolis, MN, in 2007 is $82, while in Memphis, TN, the average is $63. 3 This instrumental variable (IV) strategy is fundamentally di erent from prior work. To control for endogeneity, researchers typically look for factors that a ect the out-of-pocket price that are unrelated to the demand for insurance. This may be caused by randomness from an actual experiment, 4 a natural experiment, 5 or through another instrument that is related to the marginal price faced by a consumer, but unrelated to insurance selection. 6 In contrast, the identi cation strategy in this paper focuses on how changes in the underlying marginal cost of medical services a ect the incentives of insurers, which ultimately impacts the out-of-pocket prices faced by consumers. While this approach is unique to the estimation of medical care demand, this basic intuition is often the motivation behind instrumental variable strategies applied in the industrial organization literature (e.g., Hausman (1996) and Nevo (2001)). The demand model is estimated using individual micro data from the MarketScan commercial claims database for the years 2006 and The MarketScan data is a convenience sample of enrollees from insurers and large employers. The data includes the demographic information of individuals, such as the 1 Addressing these issues by conducting another experiment may be very costly. Manning et al. (1987) report costs of a little more than $136 million in 1984 dollars or $408 million in in ation-adjusted 2013 dollars. Even if another experiment is conducted, unique empirical challenges also arise in an experimental setting (see Aron-Dine, Einav, and Finkelstein (2012)). 2 This fact was highlighted in great detail in the Time magazine article Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us by Steven Brill. 3 These estimates were computed using MarketScan data described later in the paper. Similar di erences are also found looking at median price di erences. 4 e.g., the RAND study (see Manning et al. (1987) and Keeler and Rolph (1988)). 5 e.g., see Phelps and Newhouse (1972), Cherkin, Grothaus and Wagner (1989), and Selby, Fireman and Swain (1996), and Chandra, Gruber, and McKnight (2010). More recently, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (see Finkelstein et al. (2012) and Baicker et al. (2013)). 6 e.g., Kowalski (2010) and Duarte (2012). 2

3 age, sex, and type of insurance plan. Most importantly, the data includes information on the medical conditions of the enrollees, utilization of medical care services, and expenditures. The expenditure data indicates both the amount paid out-of-pocket by the enrollee and the total allowed amount paid to the providers. Data on income, education, and health are also incorporated into the analysis. In addition to the basic features of the data just mentioned, the MarketScan data is extremely detailed and large, with more than four million enrollees in each year. These unique aspects of the data are essential for constructing an instrument that accurately re ects the marginal cost of insurers. The instrument is computed by building an index that isolates the variation in underlying service prices (for example, the negotiated price for of a MRI for a patient with back pain), but holding utilization constant (for example, xing the number of MRIs for treating back pain). Accurately constructing a service price index across many MSAs requires a signi cant amount of detailed information, since physicians and hospitals o er an enormous number of products and services. The main result of the paper is that the individual price elasticity of medical care utilization is about -0.20, which is similar to the estimate found in the RAND study. Following the RAND study, this paper looks at price responsiveness at the disease episode level, investigating the e ect of price on the intensive margin (i.e., utilization per disease episode) and the extensive margin (i.e., the number of episodes). Similar to the RAND study, price responsiveness on the intensive margin accounts for only a small fraction of the total elasticity. Most of the individual responsiveness to the out-of-pocket price is on the number of episode occurrences. These ndings con rm the relevance of the RAND estimates in the current environment and outside of the experimental setting. Overall, the methodology and empirical ndings in this paper are of general interest as they uncover a new way of identifying consumer responsiveness from real world price movements. Although this paper argues that the negotiated service price in the MSA is a valid instrument, much of the analysis focuses on the potential for endogeneity to creep into the negotiated price in an MSA. For example, a bias could potentially enter the model if the service price in an MSA is related to the quality of services in the MSA. For this reason, a variety of strategies are employed. One strategy is to search for alternative IV estimates that are related to the marginal costs of insurer generosity. Following arguments similar to Hausman (1996), one alternative IV strategy uses the service price indexes from other MSAs within the same state. As another IV strategy, the demand for medical care services for those individuals enrolled in one plan type (e.g., PPO plans) are instrumented by using the negotiated service prices for individuals enrolled in another plan type (e.g., POS plans). Several other IV strategies and many robustness checks are analyzed and under many alternative speci cations the main results of this analysis remains qualitatively unchanged. Across all the IV strategies it is assumed that the service price instruments are determined by factors exogenous to individual demand. 7 This assumption is violated if there is an unobserved demand factor common across individuals in an MSA that is correlated with the service price instruments. To address potential violations of this key identifying assumption, this paper also studies within-market di erences in demand for two categories of medical care, prescription drugs and other medical care services (i.e., all non-prescription drug services). By studying these two markets together, market-level xed e ects may be 7 This includes supply-side cost factors and also aggregate demand factors (e.g., the population age distribution). See Kennan (1989) and Gaynor and Vogt (2003) who both point out the exogeneity of aggregate demand variables when using micro data. 3

4 included to control for the common unobserved demand factors (e.g., unobserved health of the population). While the determinants of individual demand for these service categories are highly correlated, the basic factors a ecting costs and the determination of bene ts are unique to each. In particular, the prices of medical care services are determined by local costs, while prices for prescription drugs are driven by more national factors. The di erences in the costs of these medical categories leads to variation in relative bene ts that may be used to identify demand. Based on within-market di erences in demand for these categories, the price elasticity ranges from to The next section discusses the construction of the price and utilization measures. Section 3 describes the empirical model. Section 4 presents the data and descriptive statistics. Section 5 presents the main results. Section 6 presents the results of the within-market analysis and section 7 concludes. 2 De ning Prices and Utilization The analysis in this section relies on many of the basic ideas presented in Dunn, Shapiro and Liebman (2013). To begin thinking about measuring medical care utilization and prices, it is helpful to start with a simple example. Suppose there is just a single patient, i, that is seeking treatment for high blood pressure, often referred to as hypertension (h). For simplicity, the example will start by supposing that there is only one type of treatment available, the treatments are 15-minute o ce visits where the patient s blood pressure is monitored. 8 Let c h;i = All expenditures incurred for high blood pressure (i.e., out-of-pocket expenditures plus expenditures paid by the insurer). q h;i = Number of 15-minute visits with the physician. p h,i = Price per 15-minute visit with the physician (i.e., c h;i q h;i ). Also suppose that there is a reference or base group, B, so that c h;b, q h;b, and p h,b are the total expenditures, number of 15-minute visits, and price for 15-minute visits for this base group. In this example the individual service price (SP h;i ) for person i may be calculated as: SP h;i = p h,iq h;b p h,b q h;b = p h,i p h,b. This measures the contracted price per 15-minute visit relative to the base group s price. Di erences in SP h;i s across patients would re ect only di erences in the contracted prices, not the number of visits. Dividing this SP h;i into the total expenditure of the episode (c h;i ) gives the utilization measure. That is, the individual service utilization is SU h;i = c h;i SP h;i = p h,b q h;i. This utilization measure indicates how much the insurer and patient would have paid in total for the patient s, q h;i, 15-minute visits if the contracted price were equal to the base group price. Di erences in SU h;i s across patients re ect only di erences in the number of 15-minute visits. To think about this utilization measure in terms of indexes, the total expenditures for patient i relative to the base group may be written as the product of a price index and a utilization index. c h;i ph,i q h;i ph,b q h;i = c h;b p h,b q h;i p h,b q h;b 8 This type of procedure may fall under the speci c service code as de ned by the Current Procedure Terminology (CPT) code. (1) 4

5 The rst term in equation (1) is a price index, and the second term is a utilization index. Ignoring the xed denominator in the utilization index (p h;b q h;b ), the numerator is the individual service utilization measure, SU h;i. While this example focuses on one precisely de ned procedure, clearly physicians perform many alternative types of procedures other than 15-minute o ce visits. More generally, let q h;i be a measure of the amount of services performed, where the total amount paid is calculated by multiplying the service price times utilization, p h,i q h;i. The precise calculation of the amount of services, q h;i, will be discussed in greater detail in the data section of the paper. For those familiar with medical care payments, this measure of utilization may be thought of as a relative value unit, which re ects the amount of services performed and is typically used when calculating payments to physicians. Expanding on this example, now suppose that this hypertension patient may be treated with two types of services, prescription drug and physician o ce services, where the service categories correspond to the subscripts (D) and (O). That is, q h;i;o and p h,i;o are the utilization and price for the physician o ce visits, and q h;i;d and p h,i;d are the utilization and price for prescription drugs. Continuing with the index decomposition that is parallel to (1), but with two services, the decomposition becomes: c h;i c h;r = = p h;i;o q h;i;o + p h;i;d q h;i;d (2) p h;b;o q h;b;o + p h;b;d q h;b;d ph;i;o q h;i;o + p h;i;d q h;i;d ph;b;o q h;i;o + p h;b;d q h;i;d p h;b;o q h;i;o + p h;b;d q h;i;d p h;b;o q h;b;o + p h;b;d q h;b;d The second term of the decomposition is a utilization index, and the numerator of the index corresponds to the service utilization variable studied in this paper: SU h;i = p h;b;o q h;i;o + p h;b;d q h;i;d. The general case follows from this basic example. The medical care expenditure for the treatment of a disease episode is de ned as the total dollar amount of medical care used until treatment is completed, including all service categories. 9 Formally, denote the expenditure paid to medical providers for an episode of treating disease d for insurance enrollee i as c d;i. The individual disease expenditure, c d;i, can be divided between service price and service utilization components. This can be seen by showing that the expenditure is calculated by totaling dollars spent on all services: c d;i = P p d;s;i q d;s;i where q d;i;s and p d;i;s are the s service utilization and service price components for diseases episode d for individual i for service type s. Following the examples, to obtain an individual service utilization measure, the base service price for service type s, p d;b;s, is multiplied by utilization amounts for di erent services: SU d;i = X s q d;i;s p d;b;s : (3) An individual may have more than one disease episode. For instance, an individual may have diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. An overall utilization measure may be calculated by summing the diseasespeci c utilization measure over the di erent disease episodes for individual i: SU i = X d2i SU d;i : (4) 9 For example, for an individual with a broken foot, the episode of treatment will be de ned by the dollar of medical services used to treat that condition from the rst visit to a provider until the foot is healed. For medical conditions that are chronic, we interpret an episode as expenditure for services used to treat the chronic condition over a one year period. 5

6 One can divide this measure of overall utilization into two distinct pieces: the amount of utilization per episode (i.e., the intensive margin) and number of disease episodes (i.e., the extensive margin). The conceptual justi cation for measuring utilization along two dimensions is that the physician s in uence along the intensive margin and extensive margin may be quite distinct. The patients may choose to seek care with a physician to treat their medical conditions, but after seeking treatment, the patient may have less control over the intensity of treatment recommended by the physician. While SU d;i is the measure of utilization per episode, the number of episodes can be calculated by summing the number of disease episodes for each enrollee i (i.e., Episodes i = P d2i 1).10 However, this simple count may not accurately re ect the large di erences in the intensity of treatment across disease episodes. For example, the average intensity of treatment for hypertension is much lower than that of ischemic heart disease. Speci cally, let the average utilization measure for disease d be calculated as, P i SU d = SU d;i Number of individuals with disease d. Then it should be expected that SU heart disease > SU hypertension. To construct a disease episode count that re ects the di erent average intensities across disease episodes, a measure of the weighted number of episodes is calculated by summing over the average utilization amounts for each disease d of individual i, Episodes W i = X d2i SU d : (5) The weighted number of episodes will provide the main unit of analysis for studying demand along the extensive margin. Note that the weighted number of episodes is unresponsive to changes in the amount of utilization per episode. For instance, if an individual has hypertension treated more intensively than average, this will have no e ect on Episodes W i. The only factors that a ect Episodes W i are the number of disease episodes and the average intensity of those episodes, as measured by SU d. The key explanatory variable in this study is the out-of-pocket price. Let oope d;i be the total out-ofpocket expenditures for individual i for disease episode d. The out-of-pocket price is just the out-of-pocket expenditure divided by utilization. Speci cally, the equation used to compute an individual s out-of-pocket price (OOP P ) is OOP P i = P d2i oope d;i SU i : (6) For individuals enrolled in family plans, the average out-of-pocket price across all individuals i in family f is OOP P f = P i2f faced by the family, OOP P f. 11 P d2i oope d;i Pi2f SUi. The main analysis will focus on the average out-of-pocket price Some of the analysis in the following sections involves the calculation of individual-speci c service price indexes that are constructed in a manner similar to OOP P i. In particular, the individual service price (SP i ) may be calculated by summing over all individual expenditures (rather P d2i than the out-of-pocket expenditures) and dividing by the overall utilization measure: SP i = c d;i SU i. 12 A nice feature of the out-of-pocket price measure is that identical services are priced similarly across markets. For example, if the out-of-pocket expenditure for a 15-minute o ce visit in city A is $10 and the out-of-pocket expenditure for an identical 15-minute o ce visit in city B is $15, then the out-of-pocket price measure in this paper would imply that the price for city B is 50 percent larger than city A ($15/$10=1.5) because the amount of utilization is the same, but the expenditure is 50 percent larger. In contrast, using 10 If an enrollee has multiple disease episodes of the same type, this will be counted as multiple episodes. For instance, an individual may have two episodes of a sore throat. 11 Alternative measures of out-of-pocket price are explored in robustness checks discussed later in the paper. 12 Note that this corresponds to the price component of the index in (2) 6

7 a cost-sharing measure as the relevant price would not necessarily satisfy this property. For example, if the service price in city A were $50 and the service price in city B were $75, then the out-of-pocket prices implied by a cost-sharing measure in the two cities would be identical (i.e., $10 $50 = $15 $75 ). Therefore, an attractive property of the out-of-pocket price measure, OOP P f, is that the price is measured relative to a precisely de ned unit of utilization, so that two di erent payment amounts for the same service will imply di erent price levels. As can be seen by this example, a very detailed data set is necessary to accurately price speci c services and products (e.g., the methodology will need to distinguish between a 15-minute o ce visit, a 30-minute o ce visit, and an MRI). 2.1 MSA Price Index An approach analogous to that described for measuring individual prices is taken to construct an MSA service price index. The average expenditure per episode of treating disease d in MSA r is denoted c r d. Similar to the individual level episode expenditures, the average expenditure, c r d, can be divided between service price and service utilization components. This can be seen more easily by showing that the average expenditure per episode is calculated by totaling dollars spent on all services to treat the condition and dividing those dollars by the number of episodes: c r d = P p r d;s Qr d;s =N d r, where Qr d;s is the quantity of s services of type, s; p r d;s, is the service price; and N d r is the number of episodes treated. To simplify notation, let qd r be a vector of the average amount of services utilized for the treatment of disease d in an MSA r, qd r = Qr d =N d r, where the component of the utilization vector for service s is, Q r d;s =N d r.13 Also, let p r d be a vector of service prices, where the component of the vector for service s is, p r d;s. The price for a particular service type and disease can be calculated by dividing its average expenditure per episode for service s by the average utilization for service s: p r d;s = cr d;s q where c r d;s r d;s is the average expenditure on disease d for service s in MSA r. For example, the price of an inpatient stay for treating heart disease is the total expenditure of an inpatient treatment for heart disease in an MSA, divided by the quantity of inpatient services for heart disease in that MSA. This decomposition allows for an MSA service price index (SP Id r ) for disease d in MSA r that is calculated as: which holds the utilization of services xed at a base level. SP Id r = pr d qb d p B d, (7) qb d This MSA service price index forms the basis for the main instruments used in this paper. The service price index is intended to capture the expected marginal cost for an additional unit of a medical care services for the typical enrollee in the population. Speci cally, assuming full insurance, the SP I r d re ects the marginal cost of a service for treating a patient with disease, d, in MSA r relative to the base region, B. This service price index may also be viewed as the expected marginal cost of the next service. To see this, let the probability of receiving the next service from service type s be denoted Pr d;s, then the expected relative service price is X s p Pr r d;s d;s. If the probability of each service is the expenditure share of p B d;s the base group, Pr d;s = pb d;s qb d;s, then the expected relative service price= X p B d qb d s p B d;s qb d;s p B d qb d p r d;s p B d;s = pr d qb d p B d qb d = SP I r d. 13 The services s are service categories, such as inpatient hospital or physician o ce services. 7

8 To calculate a service price index, SP I r, that aggregates over diseases in MSA r, each disease-speci c service price index, SP Id r, is weighted by the national expenditure share for that disease d for the entire U.S. Weighting by the expenditure share re ects the probability that the next dollar spent will be allocated to each disease. 3 Empirical Model of Demand There are three distinct measures of utilization studied in this paper. First, the study focuses on the responsiveness to overall utilization, which looks at total medical care use, regardless of the disease being treated (i.e., SU i ). Second, similar to the RAND study, utilization is broken into two pieces: the number of episodes (i.e., Episode W i ) and utilization per episode (i.e., SU d;i ). As argued by the RAND researchers (see Keeler and Rolph (1988)) and discussed brie y above, these two components of utilization likely involve di erent levels of control by physicians. The decision to treat an episode, such as hypertension or high cholesterol, may be thought of as a decision that is in uenced by the consumer, while after initiating treatment, the physician may have relatively more control. In any case, for each of these measures of utilization the role of information and the relative control of the physician and the consumer will likely di er, which o ers an important motivation for analyzing these decisions separately. 3.1 Components of Demand Overall Utilization To examine overall utilization, the overall utilization measure, SU i, is regressed on the log of the out-ofpocket price, ln(oop P f ), and individual demographics, Z i. As is widely known in the health economics literature, medical care utilization may be highly skewed with a signi cant fraction of individuals with no utilization. To deal with these issues, this paper follows the guidelines outlined in the health econometrics literature to test functional forms and select the appropriate estimator. Following these guidelines, discussed in greater detail in the appendix, the main speci cation in this paper will apply a GLM model with a log link. Therefore, the empirical model of utilization is: SU i = exp( ln(oop P f ) + 1 Z i + i ) + e i, where and 1 are parameters to be estimated and e i is a random error term. The potential endogeneity of the out-of-pocket price variable is speci ed using the unobserved variable i. As an example, i may include unobserved illness severity, which may be related to both more generous insurance and the utilization of more services, creating a downward bias on. In addition to an omitted variable problem, the out-of-pocket price may be measured with error. For example, the constructed out-of-pocket price measure, OOP P f, may not match the marginal out-of-pocket price, as perceived by the consumer. Both the possibility of omitted variable bias and measurement error imply that it is important to apply an IV estimator. The instrumental variable model applied in this paper is a two-stage residual inclusion model (a type of control function model). 14 The basic instrument used in this analysis is the MSA service price index, 14 As discussed in greater detail in Terza, Basu and Rathouz (2008), applying two-stage least squares estimation to this type of nonlinear model may lead to inconsistent estimates. preferred approach. In this nonlinear setting, a residual inclusion estimation is the 8

9 SP I r. The rst-stage regression of the IV procedure is: ln(oop P f ) = ln(sp I r ) + 1 Z i + i : (8a) To correct for endogeneity, the error term from the rst-stage regression is included in the GLM model to control for the unknown factors causing movements in out-of-pocket prices, such as unobserved health and measurement error, and isolates those movements due to exogenous factors. Speci cally, the estimate b i = ln(oop P f ) (b ln(sp I r ) + b 1 Z i ) is included in the GLM model and the second-stage regression is SU i = exp( ln(oop P f ) + 1 Z i + b i ) + e i : (9) There are two key assumptions. First, the instrument, ln(sp I r ), is uncorrelated with unobserved demand, i. Second, the instrument is correlated with out-of-pocket price, ln(oop P f ) Weighted Number of Episodes - Extensive Margin The weighted number of episodes is studied in a similar fashion to overall utilization. The analysis changes by substituting the dependent variable SU i in (9) with the weighted number of treated episodes, Episodes W i. A two-stage residual inclusion model is also applied to address endogeneity. The second-stage regression is: Episodes W i = exp( ln(oop P f ) + 1 Z i + b i ) + e i : Utilization Per Episode - Intensive Margin Analyzing the e ects of the out-of-pocket price on utilization per episode may include additional information about the speci c disease being analyzed. The econometric model of utilization of disease d for individual i is SU d;i = exp( ln(oop P f ) + 1 Z i + 2 X d;i + i;d + v d ) + e d;i ; where v d is a disease-severity xed e ect and X d;i is a vector of covariates that includes other disease-speci c information of the individual, such as an interaction between the age of the individual and the disease category. Similar to the other models, the out-of-pocket price is potentially endogenous. The potential endogeneity of the out-of-pocket price is speci ed in this model as the unobserved variable i;d. Again, a two-stage residual inclusion model is applied to correct for endogeneity. Unlike the previous models, a disease-speci c service price index may be included. In this case, the rst-stage of the estimation is ln(oop P f ) = 1 ln(sp Id) r + 2 ln(sp I r ) + 1 Z i + 2 X d;i + v d + i;d : The second-stage regression would then be: SU d;i = exp( ln(oop P f ) + 1 Z i + 2 X d;i + v d + b i;d ) + e d;i : Note that there are important di erences in identi cation when analyzing utilization along the intensive and extensive margins. When analyzing utilization along the extensive margin, an individual (or one of 15 In the robustness section of the paper, an additional check uses a simple count of the number of episodes. 9

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From Pawn Shops to Banks: The Impact of Banco Azteca on Households Credit and Saving Decisions Claudia Ruiz UCLA January 2010 Abstract This research examines the e ects of relaxing credit constraints on